Sydney Morning Herald columnist

Guffaws greeted the Leveson report or, to give it its full title, ''an inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the press''.

We'd sort of read it all before when Ray Finkelstein (the Fink) delivered his report in February - The Independent Inquiry into the Media and Media Regulation.

Much the same territory traversed by Sir Brian Leveson had already been covered here, and met with much the same batty responses.

You may remember that a proposed independent news media council for Australia was greeted with: ''Labor plan to control the media'' (The Australian Financial Review) and ''Fears for freedom as watchdog unleashed'' (The Australian).

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The reaction to Leveson in London was much the same. The Sun said that the judge was advocating ''state control of newspapers'' while The Daily Mail saw it as ''a mortal threat to the British people's historic right to know''. The columnist Max (Hitler) Hastings said it was ''a rotten day for freedom''.

If the case for independent media oversight was slight, it was made stronger by the dishonest way the findings of these inquiries were reported.

The freedom to tell lies should not be tramped on.

Neither report recommended state control of anything. At their heart are attempts at the careful design of systems, with statutory underpinning, whereby journalists' own code of conduct could be independently applied.

Nowhere in either Leveson or Finkelstein is there a proposal that the press not be able to publish what it wanted to, with as much biased commentary thrown in. No investigation, story or attack is to be thwarted.

Des Freedman, from the University of London, wrote in relation to the media responses to Leveson: ''What is being challenged here is the freedom to snoop, to tell lies and to evade any form of accountability, not the freedom to hold power to account, which was never on trial and which is all too rarely practised by the most shrill voices for 'press freedom'.''

Britain's Prime Minister, David Cameron, fell into line. Any form of light-touch legislation which created the proposed Leveson institution was, in the PM's words, ''crossing a Rubicon''.

I am still trying to fathom what freedom is threatened by a regime that seeks to enforce the standards of reporting that journalists claim they adhere to already: accuracy, fair opportunity for replies; resisting personal interests or beliefs, payments or gifts; fair and honest means of obtaining material; no plagiarism; respect for grief and privacy; etc, etc.

All stock standard stuff for which even the dimmest reptiles notionally put up their hands.

Cameron wants the press to validate its own standards and codes, a path so mistrodden that some of the British newspapers have disappeared into the wilderness.

It reminds me of the song and dance the lawyers put on whenever proposals for independent regulation are floated. While journalists wrap themselves in the cloak of democratic protectors, lawyers and judges see themselves as the defenders of freedom itself.

Lawyers are experts at this self-protective rhetoric, that's why at every level of their regulatory process there's a lawyer doing the regulating. Even the ''independent'' people responsible for oversight of complaints are lawyers. Occasionally there is a lay person as a minority voice on an administrative appeals tribunal, but their purpose is to stay as a minority.

With journalism and the media in general, ultimately there's a non-journalist, usually a judge, at the final tribunal.

Judges love making speeches about their own independence, which is the corollary of the independence of the legal profession.

No one knows exactly what they mean by judicial independence, which is the way it's supposed to be. Some judges think they are defending citizens against tyranny, just as journalists are fixed with the delusion they are defending the democratic process.

For instance, in 2010 the Chief Justice of Victoria, Marilyn Warren, gave an oration at Melbourne University in which she said: ''When the knock comes on the door late at night, when you are arrested and placed in custody … it is the independent judiciary to whom you may turn.''

As the contemporary legal commentator who writes as Tulkinghorn observed: ''That is very comforting … but the pages of legal history are rather light on judges valiantly standing up to oppressive regimes, at personal risk to themselves, to defend a citizen.''

As we've seen with terrorism laws and anti-gang laws, judges apply legislation created by the state, and in some instances allow themselves to be handpicked by the state as specially suited for these tasks.

The former chief justice of NSW Jim Spigelman, now chairman of a media organisation, the ABC, in 2010 berated the idea of a ''consumer/service provider model of economic activity'' being applied to the legal profession.

He could roll out the same speech now and apply it to the ABC. But what he was essentially saying was that consumers should not be given too many rights against lawyers because the rule of law would be mucked up.

By analogy, consumers should not be given too much say on the media because democracy might collapse.

The upshot is we've ended up with a legal profession that has designed a complaint-handling process so mysterious that at any given moment citizens are never certain who might be handling their concern. It may be the Law Society (or the Bar Association), it may be the Legal Services Commissioner. These outfits have the right to flip and flop complaints between themselves.

This is called the ''independence of the legal profession", i.e., self-regulation. It not only doesn't look good, it doesn't work.

Lord Justice Leveson is in Sydney but he's not here to talk about his report on the media, rather he's on about invasions of privacy.

Since his report was significantly concerned with the industrial scale invasions of privacy by the Murdoch press, it is hard to see how he cannot let his findings inform his ideas about what to do about it.